Elon Musk reckons SpaceX’s Mars rocket will be ready for short trips next year

HYPE MACHINE Elon Musk reckons SpaceX’s Mars rocket will be making short trips as early as next year.

Getting test flights underway that early is ambitious, but Musk wants to send a rocket to the Red Planet by 2022, so it looks like he’s wasting no time.

“We are building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and I think we’ll be able to short trips, flights by the first half of next year,” Musk spouted at the SXSW conference in Austin.

Musk appears to have a picture of a Mars utopia in his mind, complete with pizza places and bars once a rudimentary base is set up. He also reckons that once SpaceX shows it can make it to Mars, other companies will get in on the action to help get the infrastructure to the planet definitely not named after a confection.

“They currently don’t think it’s possible, so if we show them that it is, they’ll up their game and build interplanetary transport vehicles, as well,” he said.

But despite such heady ambitions, Musk also noted how bloody dangerous shipping humans to Mars will be. He explained that early Mars pioneers will be akin to Antarctic explorers with a good chance that they’ll die, though that’s counterbalanced by the excitement of getting to a new planet.

Musk also has more grounded ambitions, as it would appear that he’s looking to reinvent the bus with the reveal of his Boring Company’s latest project.

Boring Co urban loop system would have 1000’s of small stations the size of a single parking space that take you very close to your destination & blend seamlessly into the fabric of a city, rather than a small number of big stations like a subway

From some of Musk’s latest tweets, it appears that the Boring Company wants to create a futuristic underground bus network with electric machines capable of 150mph. The motivation is to prioritise pedestrian and cyclist travel over that of cars, which is ironic given Musk has a bloody car company. Billionaires eh? µ

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